Xuemin (Sam) Wang

Dr. Wang holds a joint appointment as Member of the DDPSC and as the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, Dept. of Biology. He received his Ph.D. from University of Kentucky, M.S. from Ohio State University, and B.S. from Huazhong Agricultural University. After postdoctoral research at Louisiana State University, he joined Kansas State University as an assistant professor in the Dept. of Biochemistry in 1991. He became Professor in 2000 and served as Founding Director of the Kansas Lipidomics Research Center before taking his current position in 2004.

RESEARCH | PUBLICATIONS | RESEARCH TEAM | LAB NEWS

Research

Membrane lipids play a myriad of structural, metabolic, and regulatory roles in plant growth and adaptation to stresses. Vegetable oils are not only major sources of calories and essential nutrients for humans, but also important feed stocks for biofuls and renewable industrial materials. Research in Wang Lab is to discover and understand the signaling and regulatory processes that mediate plant stress response and oil production. The current study is focused on elucidating how membrane lipids and phospholipases function as cellular mediators. The work involves lipid-metabolizing enzyme/gene discovery, enzyme analysis, lipid/protein-protein interactions, quantitative metabolic profiling, genetic manipulation, and various functional genomics approaches. The Lab is also interested in translating knowledge gained from the studies to improving plant oil and biomass production. Ongoing projects include studies of the role of membrane-based signaling cascades that mediate plant drought tolerance, plant response to nitrogen and phosphorus deficiency, metabolic and transcriptional regulation of plant oil production.

Technologies available for license: